By Alex Trembath
Recently, I was pleased to participate in a retreat hosted by the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), one of Breakthrough’s environment-focused partners in the abundance coalition whose mission is to “build the conservative environmental movement.” I was invited to give a short talk on ecomodernism and energy abundance. I really enjoyed the conversations both related and unrelated to my talk.
But I think the ACC team won’t mind me saying that the truly memorable aspect of the weekend was the snowmobiling.
For a few hours on an idyllic snowy day in early February, the fantastic guides at Wasatch Adventures toured our group around the trails and woods on the Wasatch Mountain. And as ACC President Chris Barnard put it when we stopped to soak in the scenery, “It may not feel like it, but this is conservation.”
When people think of conservation and nature preserves they probably picture people hiking and camping, but as Chris was getting at, snowmobiling, jet-skiing, ATVing, hunting, and fishing are also all significant sources of revenue for maintaining protected areas like the Wasatch Mountain. What’s more, these activities enable a different kind of exploration and communing with the natural world than is often possible without special gear like our Skidoo Grand Touring 600 ACE 4-stroke snowmobiles. My jam is more trail running and road biking, so I had never been snowmobiling before. It was just incredibly fun and, at times, breathtaking.
Eventually we got off our Skidoos and returned to the cabin to fire up my Powerpoint presentation. Back to reality. But several months after the retreat, I still find myself dwelling on our experience in the snow. Not because Chris’s ideas were novel to me—the “North American model of conservation” is well understood to those of us who study these things—but because, at work-related events, I have pretty rarely been invited to pause and simply marvel at the beauty and bounty of the natural world. I work in environmental policy, and it took a bunch of Republicans on 500-pound, gasoline-fueled machines to encourage me to slow down, feel the snow land gently on my face, and listen to the silence of the trees growing all around us.
I thought regularly of the retreat as I worked on an op-ed with ACC’s Isaiah Menning, which the Boston Globe ran over the weekend. In the op-ed, Menning and I argue that the abundance agenda “can be great for humans and wildlife alike—dense cities, more efficient agriculture, and streamlining regulations can make more space for wildlands.”
I was reminded again as I read Steve Teles’s excellent new essay “Varieties of Abundance,” in which he categorizes the abundance coalition along a spectrum from “Red Plenty Abundance” on the Left to “Dark Abundance” on the Right. As I read the essay, I wondered precisely where to place “Big-Ass Truck Abundance”—the term that Matt Yglesias, inspired by Senator Ruben Gallego, gave to the version of abundance in which all Americans can afford, well, a big-ass truck.
Big-Ass Truck Abundance is quite different from mainline Abundance, which tends to index for the interests of coastal urban transit-riding knowledge professionals. As Jennifer Hernandez wrote for The Ecomodernist earlier this year, abundance “only seems to apply to those of us who live in cities, can afford renewable electricity and electric vehicles, or are content to get around by bike or bus.” Big-Ass Truck Abundance would be less concerned about fossil fuel consumption and a car-centric life in the suburbs than “Cascadian” or even Liberal Abundance would be.
Obviously we ecomodernists have our own views on abundance. As Teles puts its, “The Breakthrough Institute’s ‘Ecomodernism’ is unquestionably part of Abundance, but it appears through its influence at almost every place along the Abundance spectrum, from Cascadian industrial policy advocates to Dark Abundance supporters of energy super-abundance.” And just as Big-Ass Truck Abundance probably fits most comfortably within Teles’s “Moderate-Abundance Synthesis,” it occurred to me that within ecomodernism we might find something like “Snowmobile Abundance.”
Snowmobile Abundance would offer a distinct, Promethean way of understanding humanity’s use of abundant technology to manage, protect, enjoy, and transform nature. I think it’s a useful idea because even Liberal and Cascadian Abundance, in Teles’s framework, have little to say about nature, outside of climate mitigation. Klein and Thompson are admirably clear that the abundance agenda offers a better path to decarbonization than degrowth does, but they don’t say as much about other environmental issues, in which the many conflicts between abundance and conventional environmentalism become more pronounced.
And one only needs to take environmentalists seriously to find examples of these conflicts. “The concept of abundance being advanced is too constrained and is predicated on a weakening of bedrock environmental laws,” wrote Defenders of Wildlife CEO Andrew Bowman after Abundance was published. The environmental scientist Dustin Mulvaney went as far as to call abundance “anti-environmental” in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, as I dug into in July. And in a report published last week by the Revolving Door Project and the Open Markets Institute, the authors explain “why there is already substantial skepticism towards the Abundance agenda among environmentalists.”
These attitudes stem from some fundamental environmentalist commitments: that nature is singular, pristine, and fragile and must be wholly preserved or risk total collapse; that humans are fallen and must repent through ascetic reconciliation; and that technology and consumerism tempt us away from nature and degrade our spirits.
Snowmobile Abundance would provide a different way of thinking about the relationship between humans, technology, and nature. There is no singular environment, but many environments, which humans steward, protect, manage, consume, and transform in a variety of ways. We have not fallen from nature, but risen from it, having evolved into the most intelligent and capable lifeform in the history of the Earth. Technology liberates humanity, and mediates our relationship with the rest of nature; it can destroy environments, or protect them, or allow us to enjoy them.
Snowmobile Abundance, like Big-Ass Truck Abundance, might also speak to a slice of American society not necessarily drawn to the types of outdoors enjoyment one might stereotypically associate with coastal abundance advocates. And to be clear, I say that as a coastal abundance advocate. I for one am much more accustomed to weekends spent trail running and wine tasting than ATVing or hunting. Indeed, environmentalists are more likely to try to ban these latter activities than to consider them just another way of communing with the natural world. But it’s not obvious to me why protected areas with dirt trails and agro-tourism on low-productivity farms are inherently more legitimate ways to consume nature than snowmobiling.
This is ACC’s whole thing in many ways: to advance the Rooseveltian North American model of conservation and recruit a movement of hunters, anglers, and public land ranchers, to counter the conventional environmental movement. And ACC’s environmentalism, what Menning calls “an environmentalism of dominion,” is quite compatible with ecomodernism, which advocates the decoupling of human dependence upon, but not use or management of, the natural world. An ecomodernist, mostly urban, agriculturally productive, energy abundant future is a future in which humanity needs far less land and natural resources for our well-being. What future societies choose to do with that spared land is up to them.
And it’s not just how we recreate. Snowmobile Abundance would be much more open to forms of geoengineering and ecological intervention than environmentalism’s imaginary of a pristine, fragile nature would accommodate. Snowmobile Abundance is where to go to find de-extinction, weather modification, solar radiation management, genetic engineering, novel ecosystems, and other advanced human methods for altering, and protecting, the natural environments we care about.
I suspect opinions will continue to differ on the depth of the conflict between environmentalism and abundance. Teles’s Cascadian Abundance, for instance, “combines deep environmental commitments, especially around the need for rapid decarbonization, a commitment to urbanism, and a faith in technological solutions to environmental problems.” Bill McKibben, for his part, insists that his narrow solar boosterism is the real abundance agenda (while he’s opposing nuclear energy and permitting reform and high-productivity agriculture and genetic engineering…). But if you’re looking for an environmental framework “to build and invent more of what we need,” you need to spend some time considering an environmentalism of dominion, ecomodernism, and Snowmobile Abundance.